Prereading & Links

Prereading

One of the most frequent responses to any of the Freeing Growth material is incomprehension. The ideas are too big and sweeping, and it isn't obvious why they have been chosen they way they have.

There was once a Wiki for the Freeing Growth theory at http://www.neocapitalism.org/, but unfortunately due to an incompatibility with a software upgrade that content has been sent into stasis. This is a great shame, because a few hundred hours went into writing its content. You can always use the Wayback Machine to see that wiki as it was then.

However, in the meantime, what we can do is to suggest some (pre)reading after which, we are sure, our proposals will become much clearer. We have broken the suggested reading into two categories, approach and factual.

Approach:

The following books show how our approach is in fact a very old one - we are not original, but we do keep good company. Only the last century of books is here, we could go much further backwards through Lamarckism as far as the Greeks (and tenuously still further right back to the Babylonians). We have also only chosen books which are easily available - there are many important books between 1926 and 1979, with a particular rash of them in the seventies. Unfortunately, they have all since become rare and therefore very expensive, and hence we haven't mentioned them here.

• Holism And Evolution by Jan Christiaan Smuts (1926)
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadtler (1979)
• The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems by Fritjof Capra (1996)
• The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization by Thomas Homer-Dixon (2008)

Factual:

Most of these books spend far too much time bleating on about how we ought to all be nicer to one another and proposing solutions which require everyone to cooperate peacefully which we think highly improbable. Nevertheless, as well researched, authoritative sources of what needs to be done (but not necessarily how) they are very useful:

• Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization by Lester Brown (2009 edition)

Links

Here are sites we keep tabs on and think you might also find interesting:

• The Marginal Revolution
• The Oil Drum